On this week’s episode of The Brief, host Markos Moulitsas welcomed guest Igor Volsky, executive director of Guns Down America, who has been working on gun safety and gun reform policy for over a decade. Read on for more about the ties between America’s bloody history, patriarchy, racism, and gun violence, and why we need to critique the Biden administration and hold officials accountable to create meaningful policy change so more lives are not lost.
Every year, Americans continue to bear witness to hundreds of mass shootings. The script has almost become routine: a mass shooting occurs, politicians express outrage and offer platitudes, and the news cycle moves on until the next shooting happens. And now, after the horrific events in Uvalde, nearly ten years after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, it seems that still hardly anything will be done to further gun safety. What can progressives do to create meaningful change and finally ensure that popular, nationwide support for new gun legislation actually becomes a reality?
Inaction on gun violence appears to be a mainstay of American culture, and it seems that many lawmakers simply lack an appetite to address the issue, especially given the powerful influence of the National Rifle Association (NRA) and the voices of an outspoken minority of gun owners. In this kind of environment, how do we continue to do work on an issue that is so structurally challenging?
Moulitsas welcomed Volsky onto the show to share his deep wealth of knowledge of the movement to reform gun laws, especially in this politically charged moment. Acknowledging the difficulties the movement faces, Volsky outlined specific, intersectional challenges that are important to focus on:
There’s an amendment that creates challenges, there are structural challenges within the Senate that make progress really difficult—I am, of course, talking about the filibuster and the overrepresentation of rural states. And then there’s a very successful and powerful lobby that was able to take an issue and really generate an entire identity around it. So it’s not just about the gun. It’s everything the gun represents in terms of masculinity, in terms of racism, in terms of conservative values. Those are tough mountains to climb.
Working to change gun laws has been an ongoing mission for Volsky and Guns Down America over the past decade, and Volsky outlined some important ways he takes care of his mental health to ensure that he can continue to give his all to the fight. In particular, he noted that he spends very little time following or reading the personal stories of victims of gun violence, and purposely avoids the details of the shooting or the shooter’s names. “[This is how] I kind of keep going and make sure that I’m not kind of always in some fetal position crying somewhere,” he said. “I just really try to focus on: What strategy can I carve out? What political strategy, advocacy strategy, can I carve out to make progress on this issue? To change the system that allows this kind of carnage to happen?”
Volsky also expounded on how moments like Uvalde are so important, because they underscore and demand leadership that is almost always missing on the issue of gun violence all other days of the year. Important Democratic figures like Pres. Biden and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer promise Americans when they are courting votes that they will prioritize gun violence prevention and that they will fight to make progress.
Yet, when they have the power to make meaningful progress on this issue, they choose not to, Volsky pointed out, adding that this has been the source of such incredible and deep frustration:
At this point, I don’t care what you have to say. We don’t need you to console the nation every single time. I mean, it’s nice. But what we would like … is a clear and tangible plan of what you will do to help make progress on this issue. And the fact that the White House has chosen to cast this president as a simple bystander who’s completely outsourced the work of making a legislative deal or doing things through executive action to other people, and instead has decided that he’s best as some cheerleader asking others to act, or explaining to reporters all the things he can’t do, to me is, frankly, a real shame.
According to Volsky, gun control advocates are frustrated that Biden has not even created a White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention to simply explore the issue and potential solutions. In fact, he has hardly done more than offer words of sympathy, much less taken responsibility for creating the change he is calling for:
He chose, after these twin shootings, not to outline tangible steps he would be taking to help us build safer communities. And he allowed Congress to take a two week vacation, rather than bring them all in and use those thirty years of experience he told us he had of bringing Democrats and Republicans together to get things done. But none of that matters anymore. None of that, apparently, was real when it comes to this issue.
What is most shocking to me in this moment is that other voices in my movement and other voices in the broader progressive movement don’t expect him to do more. That he gets a complete pass for not having any kind of plan. For not having any kind of vision or any kind of strategy as Americans are dying, as kids are dying. And I think it’s very unique to this issue—that if we had a foreign attack of some sort, if there was something happening suddenly with climate, you would expect this president to actually do things, as opposed to just say things … the problem is there’s just no muscle memory on this issue. There’s no muscle memory of what action actually looks like. And what I’ve been arguing for the last couple of weeks is: It’s his responsibility to change that script and create that kind of muscle memory.
“If a politician cannot take 90% support for background checks, etc., and cannot translate that support into tangible political pressure, then maybe that’s not a very good politician,” Volsky said.
“Isn’t that the story of the Democratic Party?” Moulitsas quipped.
“How is it that so many more Americans want to see background checks and we still don’t have [them]? Our Democratic leaders fail to fight every single time. They choose not to put up a fight on this issue … [or] invest in the communities closest to the pain … [if they at least tried] to get something tangible done, they may fail, but they can turn around to voters and say, ‘we tried,’” Volsky added.
The campaign to make gun rights and the identity of gun ownership so salient took decades, but ultimately it has been very successful. Volsky noted that attitudes changed historically—the result of years of NRA propaganda and marketing from gun manufacturers. No doubt this was a systematic decision, he added, to tie gun ownership to the concepts of control, personal rights and freedoms, and masculinity. “[We need to] create the space where identity is so much harder to chip away [at] than some kind of policy preference … [and] figure out how to create an identity around safety.” But shifting the conversation back to an identity of safety has proven helpful and gives me Volsky hope that it is possible to change attitudes back to what they were, despite taking a lot of work.
Moulitsas inquired about the factors that make American resistance to gun laws so fierce. As Volsky put it, it is hard to escape the unique American history that is built on conquest of other people and land—a history that that brought guns into the picture, first to subjugate Native Americans and then African Americans who were brought here as slaves. The firearm was also key in the push westward, helping white Americans obliterate entire indigenous communities and push a xenophobic narrative about personal defense against the “savage” other:
It was during this time, particularly in the 1850s and ‘60s, that firearms first became kind of mass produced and really sold in a much larger way. And some of the early American manufacturers recognized very quickly that there’s real power in wrapping the firearm in this notion of ‘Manifest Destiny’ as the country expanded westward. In the sense of, particularly, urbanization, of defining the firearm owner as the individual who will protect you from ‘those immigrants’ who are going to attack you and get you killed. That rugged individuality that that American myth is based on.
Manufacturers’ marketing departments realized early on, Volsky said, that they can sell more guns if they imbued their sales pitches with that kind of imagery, with that kind of mythology. Thus, they did so deliberately over the course of decades. The combination of that kind of marketing with our history was an explosive combination, and looking back at our nation’s history from its inception through the Civil Rights movement and the Jim Crow Era, it becomes even clearer how firearms were used to subjugate African Americans and other oppressed communities quite brutally as they fought for power. Thus, the complex and loaded notion that gun ownership is a political identity, Volsky argued, makes it particularly difficult to advocate for more restrictive gun laws:
You fast forward all the way to modern day, and I think you very quickly realize that even still, here we are, in 2022, you cannot divorce firearm ownership—particularly for people for whom this is a political identity—from notions of masculinity, from notions of white power … it’s all braided together. And until we can figure out as a movement, as a country, how you can separate those different notions, we are really going to have that challenge.
The history of militias and gun rights also created the ideological bedrock for the events of Jan. 6, Volsky posited. He also added that putting pressure on corporate America, especially grocery store chains that often donate to legislators who oppose gun control, could be the final push needed to create real change.
Reflecting on this crucial and ongoing conversation about gun control and how to create real change and enact policies to save lives, Moulitsas reminded the audience of the importance of voting.
“Midterm elections are elections based on voter intensity—how much people care. And we have to care more than Republicans,” he urged. “We have to. We don’t have a choice.”
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